Corporation

How to spell corporation

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce corporation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corporation mean?

1. nounA large company or group of people authorised to act as a single legal entity.

Corporation in a sentence

• The corporation reported record profits in its annual filing.

• She left her law firm to work as in-house counsel for a multinational corporation.

Where does corporation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin corporatio, a noun formed from the verb corporare, meaning 'to form into a body' or 'to give bodily shape to'. That verb grew out of corpus, the ordinary Latin word for 'body', the same root that sits inside 'corpse', 'corps', and 'corporal'. The idea behind the modern sense is that a group of people can be treated in law as a single 'body' acting as one person, and Latin writers already used corpus for such organised groups. English took the word in during the late 1300s and early 1400s, first for any legally recognised body of people such as a town council or guild, and only later for the large commercial company we usually mean today. The spelling preserves the Latin corpor- stem intact, which is why the tricky middle vowel is written 'or' rather than the schwa that the voice actually says.

How the word is built

• corpor- (from Latin corpus: body)
• -ation (noun suffix denoting a state or result)